In this 14‑minute live demo, Randy Dean (MBA) diagnoses the modern workplace’s attention crisis, coining "Adult Attention Deficit Disorder" (AADD) and "squirrel syndrome" to describe the flood of digital interruptions. He presents striking statistics showing that professionals spend 25‑50% of their day handling email, often checking inboxes 20+ times daily and rereading messages multiple times. Dean then introduces his core "Decision Matrix" for email triage—do it, turn it into a task, schedule it on a calendar, or delete/file it. He demonstrates concrete Outlook drag‑and‑drop techniques to convert emails into tasks, calendar events, or contacts in seconds, and contrasts these with the limited drag‑and‑drop capabilities in Gmail while highlighting alternative Gmail features (Google Tasks, Calendar, contact pop‑ups). Dean also shares a universal drag‑and‑drop text‑movement shortcut that works across the Microsoft Office suite and Google Docs, promising cumulative time savings. Throughout, he intersperses humor, audience interaction, and personal anecdotes, positioning himself as a niche expert who offers training programs on distraction management, email mastery, and mobile productivity.
Chapters
Quick question. How many of you are a little more distracted maybe than you used to be? Quite a bit more distracted than you were maybe 10, 15 years ago? I wonder why we're more distracted. Let's think about this. Why are people so distracted? Email, voicemail, snail mail, documents, e-documents, faxes, text messages, social media, office clutter, in-person interruptions. Smartphones and tablets and all of the related apps. Oh my. And look at this slide. How many of these are new in about the last 10, 15 years? Quite a few. As a matter of fact, I remember when the single biggest distraction there was was the television. Who remembers when the TV— and there was all these things in like late '70s, '80s. People are watching more television than they're even working their full-time job. You remember there used to be stories about that? And I'm old enough to remember when I was the remote control. Anybody remember those days? Yeah, Randy Dean. I hated those UHF channels. Remember those? Yeah, so I remember those days. And so what happened was we grew up in an age, most of us, before we had so much of this. And it's all come online. And I think it's led to the rise of this thing right here. AADD. What's that? Adult Attention Deficit Disorder. How many of you feel more ADD than you ever used to be? And it's because we've got all of this stuff hitting us. I saw a statistic the other day. When you count up advertisements, plus all of this— 5,000 to 10,000 potential inputs per day. Wow. And so we're struggling. And so what I want to— you know what I think it's led into is this thing right here called the squirrel syndrome. Squirrel, squirrel, squirrel. And by the way, do you know how freaking hard it is to get that picture right there? Yeah, I took that picture. I'm like, my neighbors think I'm nuts. I'm walking around going, tuk-tuk-tuk-tuk, dah! And they're like, what's this guy doing with his phone and the squirrels? It's a little odd. So yeah, but I want to talk about this because in order to control these things, you got to have this thing down. And I only have a little bit of time today. So what I want to do is focus in on that big one, email. How many of you, by the way, how many of you just love working on your email? Actually, we got one. Every once in a while, somebody does raise their hand to that question. I had a woman the other day. She goes, I like to click on them and watch them go away. Yeah, okay, yeah. So, so, um, yeah, how many of you are stressing out right now because, you know, emails are coming in while I'm up here speaking? Isn't that where a good number of you at? And so what I want to do is hit this, hit this one a little bit while I've got a little time with you. This is the harsh reality. And by the way, this is also— is this your poor career choice? You're gonna find out if you made a poor career choice here. How many hours per day does the average American office-based professional spend simply reading, responding to, and administering their emails? In hours per day, give me some guesses. 4.5. That's a pretty specific number. 2. 3? 2? OK, I can't tell. He's doing this. Is that a 2 or a 3? All right, 2. OK, 3. So 3 to 4.5. 3 to 4.5. 3 to 5? 6. 6? 3 to 6. 3 to 6. Head nod? Most of you going, yeah, yeah, sounds about right. Had this woman in Orlando a couple, 3 weeks ago. I was speaking at a conference. Here's how she answered the question, and I quote, "12." You feel the poor air sucking out of this lady, right? Yeah. Some people are doing quite a bit more than even 3 to 5. The actual average, though, is just a little bit more than 2. But most audiences I speak to, I'm getting that 2 to 5 average pretty consistently, which means, if you think about it, 25% to 50% of a typical workday, you're just doing inbox. Right? Follow-up question. How many of you before today— and you can't raise your hand if you've ever been to one of my sessions before— how many of you before today have ever had a formal strategic-level email management course? We got one. I had a session in Vegas— two. I had a session in Vegas a couple, three years ago. 550 people in the audience. 4 people raised their hand. What I'm seeing consistently around the United States, Canada, and Europe, 1% to 3% of working professionals have had training on a tool that takes 25% to 50% of their workday. Wow. Which has been, frankly, very good for yours truly. What a great little niche. I love email dysfunction. It's a wonderful thing. But here's the thing. I want to give you some strategies right off the bat while I got a couple of minutes here with you. Because here's the statistics. It's crazy. Look at some of these statistics. First, half of you are doing 25% to 50% or more, 1% to 3% will change. Look at this statistic. Because of the way you're doing it, you're looking at each and every email you get 3 to 7 times. You're reading them over and over again. Additionally, get this, you're checking your inbox 20 or more times per day, which is every few minutes. Now, that's one pretty big squirrel right there, wouldn't you agree? Squirrel, squirrel, squirrel, babbling. All right. And additionally, 13% of you now show clinical addiction to your phones. More than 30% of high school and college students with phones are clinically addicted. I believe there are now 3 recovery centers around the United States for electronic addiction. Not drugs or alcohol. Phones. Wow. You know that a significant percentage of high school and college kids wake up between 2 and 4 in the morning to check their feeds? That's no joke. That's scary. Alright, additionally, you're looking at your phone 150 times per day. That's the average person. And get this, you're also getting 10 to 25 people stopping by your desk, tapping you on the shoulder, phone calls. You add in texts, that might go up to 40 to 50. Because of this, 95% of working professionals report being distracted at least some point during the day. And for the life of me, I am trying to figure out who's the last 5%. What, like, Lighthouse Keeper? Who is this 5%? But here's the problem with this. If you don't have strategies for managing this stuff, you're at significantly more likely risk of overwhelm and overload. And so what you have to do is you've got to have some strategies here. So I'm going to dive into that email thing. Here's two ways email owns you, two key ways. One, you're looking at it way too much. OK, so we're going to talk about that maybe in a little bit. Second one is you're reading them over and over again, same one, same messages over and over again, doing nothing with them. Doesn't that sound a little bit crazy, by the way? Doing the same thing over and over again, doing nothing with it? Anybody know the clinical definition of insanity? That's pretty close, isn't it? So let's dive into that part two. I've become pretty well known for this little thing. It's called my decision matrix. Decision Tree for Email, and it walks you right through what you do with an email. Now, first thing I always tell people, if you get an email, it's something you can handle quick, what do you do? Get it done. Why are you looking at it multiple times? Just deal with it, get it done, and get it gone. Longer ones go on to your task list and/or your calendar. All right, task or calendar. Now, once you've got an email either done or on your task list or your calendar, do you need that in your inbox anymore? No, then you only got two choices then. What are your two choices with that email? Delete it because you no longer need it, or file it into an appropriate subfolder archive location. But what if you don't have a good folder to put it in? You know what's funny? Sometimes at this point people go, "Delete it?" No, make a folder, put it there. Is that rocket science? That is not rocket science. Wouldn't you agree that's not rocket science? That's advanced common sense. But what do they say about common sense? Not all that common, right? Although, sort of funny, I'm speaking at this event down in Huntsville, Alabama a couple years ago. This is sort of funny. I'm in Huntsville. You know, that's where Space Camp is. You know, the NASA rocket park's down there. And I'm speaking right outside the hotel, Saturn V rocket, no kidding. And I didn't know it, but in the room that day, I actually had a legitimate NASA rocket scientist in the audience. And I go, is that rocket science? And he goes, yes, it is. Houston, we have a problem. No, it's not rocket science. It's just advanced common sense. And did you know tools? Outlook and Gmail can help you with this. Watch this. All right, I'm gonna pop in. By the way, who would like that as their inbox? Eh. You want to really hate me? I left those in here so I'd have something to show you today. All right, almost every workday I get that baby all the way down to zero. But here's the thing, does that mean I've gotten everything done? Not at all. All it means is that if I couldn't deal with what is in that email right now, it moves out of my inbox into one of my two primary day-to-day planning tools, which would be— we've already mentioned them, what are they? Calendar or task list. And watch this, Outlook can help you. Check this out. Alright, so I got this test email to show you how to do conversions, but my actual task is I have a whole series of bonus PDFs in little electronic form that I'd like to offer all of you. So I'm going to share with you how to do that at the end of the session. You got one of them in your bags. I put one of my little articles in your bag. But check this out, check this out. I can take this email, left-click, hold the click, drag it down here to the word task, drop it. That's drag and drop Microsoft Outlook. And that creates a brand new task. But wait a second, subject line's wrong. Send PDFs. If I can type. MDW. Look, due date. Eh, we'll say today. It'll probably happen tomorrow actually, because I'm traveling right after this. Priority high. Category client prospect. Category marketing PR. And you know what category? Maybe I will add Angela onto this. How long did that take? A few seconds, 10, 15 seconds. And I was talking. If I'm not talking, I can do that in 8 seconds flat. I can convert that email into the task that it actually is. But do you have to do it in Outlook Tasks? Not necessarily. How many of you instead start your day with your sticky? Who does a sticky? OK, we got some people with a sticky. No, Randy, I do the big sheet of paper task list. Who's got their big sheet of paper? A few big sheets of paper. How many of you actually use a tool like Outlook Tasks? Outlook Tasks? Quite a few. Anybody using Google Tasks? There's actually a pretty robust little task tool in Google that I sometimes teach too. Anybody here have a cool smartphone or tablet task app? And how many of you are just saving these as reminders in your calendar? Anybody doing that little number? That sorta counts. That's a sorta, that's sorta turning it into a task. All of these are viable potential options for turning an email into the task that it is if you can't get it done right now. All of them, right? I don't care which one you use, whichever one you're most comfortable with. Let me ask you this. How many of you— how come first some of you raised your hand several times? I got like 6 task lists. What are you doing? Trying to figure out which task list to look at. All right. And how many of you raised your hand to any one of those tasks? Anyone? So most of you doing some form of a to-do list at the start of the day? Did you know that's step 1 for being diagnosed Type A? Step 1. It's not the full test. Do you want the full test? All of you doing your little daily task list? Have you ever done something that wasn't even on that task list and then you wrote it down just so you could check it off? Type A diagnosed. All right, yeah. Actually, in my Outlook class, I show why that's genius to do just that. So that's pretty cool. And by the way, if you don't trust yourself when you're doing this, just do this. Look at this. Reminder. Save and close. Bam. Do it. There it is. Look, I can set it up so my task list comes and finds me. If I don't trust myself when I first do this, I can have it so it pops right up. And then I can do what pretty much everybody in America does when you do one of these. Snooze. OK. All right. But wait, but wait, there's more. Hold on. Let me see. Maybe I should block time on my calendar to send you one of these. OK, let's drop that to calendar. Oh, and look at this. I can pop right in here, send. PDFs, MDW, location, home office, East Lansing, Michigan. Yes, I am a Michigan State guy. All right, enemy territory out here. Okay, and tomorrow at 1 o'clock. How long did that take? A few seconds flat, I've turned that thing into a calendar item. But wait, one more. Let's close this. You want to save changes? No. I'd like to get this Randy Dean guy into my contact database. That way I'll never forget who I am. Left-click, hold the click, drag it down here to People or Contacts. Drop it. That auto-creates a brand new contact item in Microsoft Outlook. But take a look at this. It doesn't just populate name, it populates email for me automatically. Nice. But hold on, look, the email text is over here and I can page down here to the signature. Oh, look at that job title. Let me grab that job title. Pick that up. Move up to that up here to job title. Let me grab that phone number right there. Pick that up. Move that right over here to phone. Let me grab that mobile number right there. Pick that up. Move that right over here. Mobile. How long did that take? Devon, that's my magic trick. All right, whoa! Notice I didn't even do a copy and paste right there. I did an end click, drag over, and move. A what? Watch close. End click on the end of the text you want to select, drag over to highlight it. Once it's highlighted, release the click. Then you can pick it up, move it wherever it goes. And once you master that little trick, that'll save you a couple seconds every time. But that doesn't just work in Microsoft Outlook. Listen to this. That works in the entire Microsoft Office suite— Word, Excel, and PowerPoint— as well as in Gmail, as well as in Google Docs. You can take a piece of text or data in the wrong place in your document or file, highlight it, pick it up, and move it to the right place, saving you a couple seconds every time once you master it, which means I just gave all of you 2 extra days this year right there. Pretty cool. And now, sorry Gmail users, that whole drag and drop thing, that does not work. That does not work in Gmail. Sorry. But hey, Gmail users, did you know you can pick up and open a Gmail, and once you go in, you can go to the More button and add it to Google Tasks or add it to the Google Calendar? And if you just put your mouse over the sender's name and leave it there for a second, it'll pop up. Oops, did you see that? Hold on, let's try that again. Contacts. Wait, that's not the same. But that is most definitely the same. See what you can do here? This is just one of the strategies I share when it comes to contact management. I do distraction items, a program on distraction management. I do a program on taming the email beast, how to better use Microsoft Outlook, how to better use Gmail, and how to better use your smartphones and tablets. So keep me in mind if you're looking for somebody to share this kind of info with your audience. Thank you, everybody.
